Welcome one and all to Professor battles over a defeat and calamitous commentary. The philosophical chain game today’s episode identity in the four A one K. Well I’m your host Professor medal. I’m Sean. I’m Bruce Gordon River. And you know what we finally got a colon. But there are back X.. So that was saying I’m cone shenanigans. Well I guess today’s episode will be time travel and paradox to your future selves. I’m your host professor of Middle School shown. I’m Bruce Sure. OK. Time travel or brain is at it you fool. What if you will have done. Welcome one and all to Professor metals irate and calamitous commentary with the philosophical chain getting today’s episode identity in the four A one K.. I’m your host Professor model I’m Sean when Bruce i River and then guess what. We got a call and finally really. Yeah somebody actually called us and left a message. Let’s hear it. So that was the thing I’m going to mannequins you fool. What move you will have done. I’m claiming no responsibility for anything that goes well then to day’s episode will be a time traveler and a paradox you our future selves. Anything I am your host Professor metal and still Sean and Bruce still River I think. So paradox isn’t Andrea making my head hurt a little bit. There are many theories of time travel but certainly a living wage. Popular Culture train tries to interpret time travel. It’s a fixed the method of time travel with important time travels really the consequences I mean yes from a theoretical because it’s fun to think about how it might be accomplished. You don’t want to think of how whatever means magic whatever. What would it mean. Sure and a lot of the eries around time travel have to do with ways of correcting for paradoxes right problems like the famous grandfather paradox in which you go back and kill your grandfather before your father has been born and thus there is no father for you to have to have gone back and children are grown. We didn’t do that so you did do it so you didn’t do it for you to do it and. Always but the league gets around this I think one of the most recent notable examples of of correcting the grandfather paradox as it were would be Futurama where fright goes back and spoiler alert become since grandfather sort of which creates a separate type of sort of a paradox which is something that exists only because it exists within the time loop in these are called some propagating solutions to the problem. If I have a solid gold potato riser that I find in Bury in a hole in my backyard and I then decide to go back in time and bury it in my yard so that I can find it later. Where from does the professional riser come and usually it has no cause it just pure effect. Back to future deals with cults ality which is if you change something about the Taiwan in any significant or what ends up being significant although it may be somewhat minor. Way crash really alter the way things play out. So the length of your series has a very specific view on how time handles these things and that is branching timelines. If you change something in a past time that something will significant to nothing that we see that some of the sense can be changed because they are not significant enough to create a whole derivation but we see Marty creating a situation wherein best becomes rich and powerful and creates a whole new future event that an entirely different timeline from the events that went on in his life. When I think back to the future to handle that a little bit better than the first one the first one had a number of problems one of which is marketed and out of existence. If you wouldn’t have been born to come back at what point does this is a page out of her Why at that particular time. What mechanism is causing that. We don’t know. We know you know the problem of the first movie is that when he finally returned to his to his time his parents are cool they’re successful they’re much more well adjusted than they had been originally but that would suggest that his life had gone differently he wouldn’t probably wouldn’t have been hanging out with the weird old a scientist and he probably wouldn’t have gone back in time at all if he had been raised by more well adjusted parents he would have been more well adjusted and so. So the two mores are so part of what we may be seeing fixed point in time fixed events that cannot be changed. Like meeting dark brown and getting into a time machine which has been centrally become fixed plot points for the writers in order to make it work. Certainly there’s other media that has dealt with the whole concept of a fixed point in time. Dr who is a really great example of the idea that a live event is so monumental is changing it would be so drastically different would have such drastically different outcome that it can’t be helped it can’t be stopped it can not happen as it were. Because if it does bad things happen. Time search for collection Dr Who while I think we should try and Dr Who as seriously as we can I think we also have to have a little bit of a disclaimer that even Dr Who deals with time travel about as seriously as I don’t know we all do a little crazy Brits sets up rules in order to create certain limitations so that there can be conflict and then it breaks this rule. It uses a rule basically as the writers need to tell a good story at the time and it’s a great show and I don’t want the WHO being a community to come out thinking we were bashing on them. I know at least several of us in the room are huge fans and would not want to come up in any way of being down on it but when you talk about a very serious time travel there does have to be a little bit of an asterisk next to the time. He wanted me to be nice. Well actually in Dr Who is about the soft sciences it gets when it comes to time travel it is a contrivance first and foremost and a concept of theorization dead last. But that said it does introduce an instant consequence time for the writers of certainly considered what might have to be involved in the kind of convoluted story they’re telling in order to write some of these ships to help them make sense for continuity. That’s that I think the fixed point in time notion. Much like the Marty fades out of existence a notion I don’t really see in physics mechanism would cause that. I think it is. Contravenes for storytelling grossest I think if it were actually serious about time travel is going to discard that notion as well. Well I think that Marty is fading from existence is actually seeing Marty fading from this timeline that essentially we don’t really get a lot of explanation in the movie that was just sort of happened and everybody knows I love this band because you know a lot of pain but I think that might be a representation of a branching timeline being formed one in which he’s better and one in which he’s not and he’s being violently removed from the timeline to the other one at the point that the timeline came from is no longer possible. That’s one ceases to be. There may be a case to make that I think branching timelines are good way to resolve paradox. However I think when you saw it in time that you go back at the point that you go back you create a bridge. Whether or not you really need gauge yourself from having been able to do so I think you’re still there you just become sort of a refugee from a timeline that never existed because the notion that. This goes back to my martinis and would not have grown up to be the same guy this Marty isn’t the same Marty who will exist even if his parents do get together. Certainly from his direct intervention he is in the exurban changed things but I think for sake of everybody sanity and control of the court too much they kind of have to be the same person at the end of the beginning other than maybe learning a valuable moral lessons about how man takes Well that’s certainly one interpretation of arranging time one’s Another possibility is that the branching timelines of it in some way intertwined with the Many Worlds Interpretation of multi verses and quantum theory. It’s possible the branching timelines as we understand them are just our inability to see all the other possible timelines the going to exist and that at any time we were able to go back. Presupposing we were able to go back that we would make choices understand a new series of these branches created from every decision. It’s not that it’s new it’s not that it wasn’t there in the first place. It’s that we didn’t experience the last time. So now we’re on a different course but that that course has always been part of the total of universes in taking a different journey through the garden work and grounds and I think that is the best way to resolve this was a negative paradox particularly if you say that if someone comes back and prevents the timeline that would have caused him to come back. Now we’ve got this extra person here who comes from a time when that never happened. It’s sort of washed ashore in this one where they never existed maybe they were never even born into just sort of this extraneous person left out that’s the only way you could really result it’s odd then it’s almost sort of a self-perpetuating paradox in that that person had no cause they came from. That was never taken so let’s talk about some of the other methods and the resulting error. Cars that have been used a great length in popular media. One of them self correcting. It’s like somebody doesn’t die when they’re supposed to. The universe starts changing it’s over the toilets are changing and so so I searched for him to kill that person like the Final Destination movies where the time travel isn’t physical but it’s information the sort of premonition prophecy that the character has and that the universe sends the other ninety minutes of the film trying to off the rest of the characters that were supposed to die in the first five minutes you go back in time and kill the young Adolf Hitler before his chance to rise to power. But by some strange coincidence he happens to have a friend and Schmidt learns that rise to power and does all things Hitler would have done it’s just that there’s now a very minute change of some sort. The person who did it or the event that happened in there they’re going to go back to this rescue. This prophecy that is in the Mary’s mother and father he leaves town he goes to the need to travel far away something that will never happen. Little does he know he was adopted. Trying to avoid it makes it happen. We see that all the time but the notion of a self correcting universe that things that have a prophecy that is also time travel there is information coming backwards in time. Sure so the same the same kinds of problems apply and we see the same several media options. We see time you when looking forward like in paycheck. We see time manipulation that allows you to send information back when in frequency there are plenty of ways where maybe people can’t be passed back and forth but maybe other things could be but if we’re going to throw in science fiction you had a Star Trek transporter and people or information. Certainly there are some interesting implications of that when you start crossing into stuff like that. I’m not sure. Any era could possibly account for all of the possible variables but I think until we’re not entirely on board with it but there’s a certain thing I like about the notion of a self correcting universe in my problem with the quantum branching in many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is that given all of the particles in the universe any of which could zigzag any number of ways in any given moment. So for every single particle in the universe let’s say it’s got one hundred different things it could do in the next millisecond. Take that hundred to the power of the number of particles in the universe and that’s how many universes are being created every millisecond. There is a huge conservation of energy problem considering how badly and rapidly all these universes of being created. So it’s branching timelines to be somehow woven back together. This one ends up being the same as that one so they’re the same one. If those forking paths could rejoin down the road then it doesn’t have to expand out so far and so greatly. We have sort of a constant star constantly size made universe if we break the branches back together. Well in that kind of gets into some philosophical concepts that we didn’t really talk much about till this point which is determinism soft and hard determinism which act similar to what the concept of destiny would be but not quite. More needed to do something which hard journalism dictates in philosophy dictates everything that is going to happen and has happened will happen in that exact way we just don’t have knowledge of what is going to happen it just will happen is that way. There is no change in it whatsoever. Whereas soft interment ism is the broader strokes is it. We’re it. These bigger things everything kind of reaches the same end goal but it can happen in any different in many different ways than a lot of problems people seem to have with this is special of hard determinism is the notion that brings about that there is no real free will because if everything is going to happen in a specific way and there’s no changing it we don’t have to move all it’s just going to happen. So what you’re describing as I use the terms is what I would think as opposed to Zapatero as pain was I’M is there are a series of events small and large will lead up to some of them that is going to happen one way or another such as in the year twenty seventy three mankind to discover is called fusion. How we got there or which choices about whether to go to Starbucks or another coffee place whether I have dark beer pilsner which color pants I wore on any given day or even up to the level of whether or not I decide to have children whether or not I ran for Congress. These kinds of decisions are still free but there are some of us that are fixed no matter what else I try and talk to journalism as I understand it anyway. I put a gun to your head and I say you can’t leave our arrival future in that you think a decision is to have choice but the choice you have is limited by whether or not you would likely want to die. The chance that you will die over not eating a candy bar very slow and so I increase the odds to the point where you almost didn’t know which one you want to make the heart of Germans and a problem with it is from an epistemological point of view. If we can’t if we can’t know even in principle whether something is so then what opposition to rationally assert that was so and we can’t really know in Peru. Well whether subatomic or quantum things are always going to go the same way but then again our determinism isn’t exactly relevant either into some question and some fairness in what you’re saying and I think we could have a much longer discussion about that. For now let’s try and stick with time travel and move on. That’s for other ways to time travel paradox. Well they can see in some time travel media is the whole destiny aspect like the characters going back and doing things and coming back to their own timeline everything’s the same. Despite this whole looming question of what have what will we have radically changed only to find out they were kind of supposed to do in the first place. Like that but that is I mean sort of fatalism that is and I want to say Babylon five does there’s a couple points where there’s time travel but it was meant to happen that way you find out after the part. So perpetuating version using actions with each other. One thing I think was worth bringing up is the art use thing you’ve got to be extremely careful if you step on a butterfly it can change everything vastly and it would be worse so don’t do that. Then I don’t necessarily think that that’s a better thing is it’s all a set out of it. Maybe stepping on a butterfly could have made things vastly better than I could’ve imagined. Well I think that’s the part of the people concerned about in these situations is the not knowing whether to link things better for the way things worse or everything will just kind of shift sideways a little bit. But and that’s the position we’re in right now. Any change I make right now could lead to a future that is vastly better vastly worse for all. Right but the difference isn’t even a baseline. They have a baseline right. They’re very slimy and this is how things have been up till now and we’re still here we’re still live. We have a culture we develop time travel we have signed those things are for a lack of any specific definition of what could have been pretty good and so you are gambling with a known quantity. If you go back in time stuff on the butterfly. Yes things could be better but they could also be worse. And why take the chance when you’ve already got it pretty good compared to the ME and ME in the here and now not knowing the future the only significant difference is that the ME has gone back to back into the past knowing a certain future has more information than I do now. There were changes in the mix and actions that he does are more likely to be beneficial actions he intentionally takes are more likely to be beneficial if we assume you are smart enough to have calculated out exactly how things go. There will certainly be intended to be better most likely unless you’re mad geniuses decided to go back into their ships two hundred years or older people now you know I’m just I’m talking right now probably a very good idea. It’s true that things could be worse but having more information means that chances are probably better killing Hitler at some point you know is likely to prevent a whole lot of horrific stuff. Although it might not so I don’t this is a bit pedantic but I honestly dislike the whole going back until we had were as the first thing a time traveler would do. But problem is it was killing Hitler. Yes it would feel good for the person who did it and it would potentially inexorably change the timeline. But problem is it wasn’t just Hitler that was the evil bastard it was everyone down the chain of command. You would have to kill an awful lot of Germans to turn to actually. In the exurban Lee changed things so that the Second World War didn’t happen and that was cloned. That’s because I could tell that you there weren’t permission or not having any. Well to that point I like to bring it back to the idea of there are certain things that even if you went back and tried to change them that those things would have to happen in one way or another and specifically those events that perhaps another variation of this is that there are some of us that have to happen but they can be changed a little bit they can be aesthetically different as long as the impact of the same and supporters I would want to point to probably the greatest time travel movie of our generation which is of course Hot Tub Time Machine in which the people going back to do get to affect things of the things they are fact are only capable of making so much of a rebel. One of the main character stays in the back as stated back in time so that he can create a search engine of some notoriety along a certain lines of a search engine we are all familiar with called Google except in his version of the reality that has come about from his being back in time now called Lugo which is the same function but has a difference that it and somebody else is the rich bastard for having And and as such he’s allowed to make changes but only small changes of the don’t impact the actual situation which kind of makes sense because Google didn’t become popular because of its name being popular because a lot of very complicated mathematical work that the founders the Masters I think the age he’s in there and that was that was what drove it made it good. Certainly then we we sort of have the other side of the cooling was that we can’t get out of this thing though let’s just treat the timeline Bleecker own person. No policing and that is of course probably one of the better movies of last generation. Concerning time travel. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s bogus journey. You literally are not allowed to discuss time travel though and getting up at least once I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of international document certified by George you know it’s just our destiny but this is a movie that definitely wasn’t afraid to play fast and loose with the timestream. I mean there’s one point where they didn’t really want convenience themselves out of a jail so by leaving a key under a rock. Later the the scene takes place like that. It’s only oh why don’t I just go back later and leave that here this rock. So I do things in the future. You know assuming they do their follow through wish which is interesting because at the very beginning go into it aren’t really known for completing projects they start and they become very good at it. Also Dr who is an aggressor does the same thing to get out of a jail cell decide to do something later. And then you have it. So don’t actually for being such a goofy time travel movie actually does get a lot of its key points in order to keep themselves moving forward. And in that case I’m specifically talking about that jail cell thing. I’m thinking of the moment when they have to explain that only the victors of this current fight will be able to go back in time and put things around for themselves because the other guy will last and thus will not be able to time travel and thus creates an opportunity for them to actually deal very seriously with the problems of causality in this way in a very light hearted and silly venue. Oh absolutely. Another during this and apropos of nothing one of the ways of seeing some shows try to avoid too much potential paradox is the notion that you can never meet yourself the old you can never see the new you. They’re very vague as to why because usually you know just to be avoided but just barely. Potter prisoner of ask them time turner was the greatest sneak around. Sort of. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ing their own history in the in the wings messing things about in order that things right. Yeah this is a very common plot device in time travel that’s sprinkled in but is not the main focus of a movie or book or whatever because it’s clearly a plot contravenes that way. So a lot of times if something is all about time travel if you’re talking about a movie or or a comic even that has time travel wasn’t central promise. I generally avoid these problems pretty early on by either laying out a very stipulated set of rules for Tundra or by creating a time travel that doesn’t have these problems for some other reason and when you sprinkle time travel into another kind of story then you have to do sort of deal with I haven’t thought of a whole backstory of time travel. Instead I have to kind of give you some hard and fast. Don’t do this and and that’s a pretty easy one to understand why it would be problem. All in the funny thing is it’s kind of written science if you are in the same time period as a former you you have only increased the total mass of the universe assuming the universe is a closed system. And there’s the problem of mass occupying the same space and that’s kind of where that derives from this you shouldn’t interact with yourself because it’s the same mass occupying relatively the same space. And that stuff could potentially happen. Nothing specific standing next to you as well but that also doesn’t make sense or gets me going back to talk to me. Right four year old me is not the same but I am I shedding cells all the time and shedding cells will cause my body to be a different set of things so I can interact with the same set of things in the same way that say I don’t know two watches from different time periods. It’s entirely fair it’s just that’s the way I’ve seen interest before and unfortunately does fall down kind of under its own weight because human beings are constantly rebar regenerating themselves over time whether it’s something interesting to think about it nothing else. Well I have another instance of pop culture use of this not about people but about objects is the reason why fashion twelve Monkeys twelve Monkeys deals with this particular problem by having a watch that goes back in time and the guy is holding the watch and there’s a woman and she’s wearing the earlier version of the watch and he scratches the face of the watch and sort of a universal energy of some sort. Creates a scratch along the face of the watch he’s holding out for visual effect at some point later the actual touch that you watch together creating a paradox and a huge outpouring of energies created by us. Basically what that gets us to is time travel would by its very nature violate this notion we have of the conservation of mass or energy and so whatever mechanism we believe is in place to prevent that would either prevent time travel or would be superseded by this other effect on the conservation of mass or energy applies not to a specific universe or rather the specific path through the branching in. But it’s a little more or potentially that out of the universe or multiverse if of many worlds interpretation is to be believed is not a closed system. Well and I think that is the inherent violation time right is that it’s not a closed system. If things came back in time if things can’t go back in time that is of course right. So as for the multiverse problem another possible solution to the conservation of energy in that level is some decisions will destroy universes and some decisions will creep. So there may be an equal number of destructions and creations happening simultaneously allowing for sort of you know a whole load of bubbles in which one deflates and the energy goes into making a new one somewhere in this is where something like fatalism could come in and collapsing the bridging timelines back into the same universe is something that sort of a gravity pulling pulling the expanding many worlds back together to try and keep the number of them relatively constant. Certainly possible I mean I think there’s speculation of absolutely you could say anything more solid then sure why not. I think time travel would be the only critical test for the many worlds interpretation it remains in principle undecidable unless we could go back a branch and follow a different one. There might be other possible ways that one could enter a different time space dimension of all that would not necessarily involve going back to our own history. It will go to a different history really going to a different future or different now I could end up in a world where somehow all blue jays or green fields to do Star Trek the Roman Empire is still around. Out in their televising letter to worry about. Sure we think many world seriously all possibilities are happening so yes we want the capital letters. Yes Actually thinking about this a little bit brings up a question I hear a fair bit in speculation controlled media is if time travel really could exist. Why have we not seen any time travellers yet wellness into another good reason for the you can’t talk to interact with yourself right so that we have an explanation for why news has now. Because people may say the first thing they do is go back and fill in the world. First thing I would do is go back and tell myself how to get rich. Yes I would immediately try and take care of myself. It was them who were on the list maybe you know and you know I don’t have to kill him you can just go back and give in or go to the list may look like you know go back and tell myself not to eat him sandwiches laced and you’ll end up in an enormous stop talking right about now. That’s one of the fiddlers and things you haven’t gotten any worse. Maybe it’s one of those things like time travel and by extent Time Travelers are her kind of beholden to the most bad ass nondisclosure agreement of all time. If you screw up if you tell anyone if you make yourself known as a time traveler you’ll get erased. Well that would require some kind of organization to enforce that like time cards. Well that would be universal role but a lot of media definitely asteroids and you see it’s not specifically tendre movie but when you talk about the one gently action flick in which he goes around killing his other selves in order to gain power and then another self of him. Decides that’s no good and start fights. Against him. And there is a interdimensional police agency to prevent people from doing this this is a really common travel in time travel that there is some sort of other time zone dimension. Whatever group they didn’t run does this because they created the time travel and so they feel responsible for upholding it being done properly. Almost like our history up until the point where time travel gets created as sort of like a nature preserve and there are park rangers preventing people from messing with her for various reasons. Well there really be no such thing as history if you move if you model with too much everything becomes so so perpetuating a paradox. And if we postulate some form of time travel that everyone has access to it becomes a necessary to think that those kinds of time travel as an Australasian most science fiction is very specifically an individual or a small group of individuals have access to it and can do it. The scientists who invented it or they’re the government people who have been sent back to do something specific or some other limiting factor. If we imagine time travel in the way that pinpoint Guardian for example that time tourism becomes sort of the popular thing to do then you have to consider what so many changes even minute changes constant changes to a timeline could do it. But even if there was some organization preventing time travelers from becoming known and there was it was very limited that very few people could get access to it. Assuming that that our future goes on forever all you’re really doing is reducing the number of them who are here or the chances of one of them appearing publicly. And the further the further the future that goes that still approaches one that still approaches one hundred percent of we haven’t publicly known the time traveler before now so I would suggest that our future is finite or that I think we have a more compelling reason not to mention being from another time. Well yes certainly I mean if somebody came up to you on the street said I’m from the future you’d probably look at them and go Yeah sure everybody you know em kind of brush it off or you know I think they’re a little off because I actually don’t live in one of my favorite time travel shows currently running. It’s called Continuum and in that they deal with two really interesting things one being the crazy time travel and the time traveler who is ostensibly just a nut job because they are saying all of these things will happen in the future but you have no reason to believe them and they also don’t want an interesting solution to leave their lives which is what I would call taking up trash. Basically if you have branching timelines maybe the universe can’t support all and once a change is made from one timeline branch to another video or the old timeline that was in existence before that collapses and is destroyed so the twelve monkeys also has the time traveler goes to an insane asylum. And it also has people go in the past to sickly to prevent their more recent history from occurring. They’re trying to destroy the universe as they know it which is somewhat different from our notion of oh be careful about stepping on a butterfly or it change everything. They’re back internationally to change everything because things have gotten so bad that they’re intolerable as if they were trying to play chicken with chaos. They really are something which is where the butterfly effect comes from I think that things couldn’t possibly get any worse than this. Somebody who comes from a post-apocalyptic or just just to be and sort of future like yeah no I don’t care what happens. It has to change. Something has to change. Pappy said is that the right thing to do. It’s been to the future path also does it repeatedly escape the bad guys by going back in time and getting away. We see them die repeatedly. But then they get someone back in time so that they didn’t say but then they decide to go and change the entire history of it that is in question. Other than such massively apocalyptic scenarios where just everything is as it can be actually even in those situations because the people in those aren’t looking those from our point of view to compare to what amount of hubris does it take to say OK I’m going to we’re going to work in this project to send someone back in time to wipe out the last twenty fifty whatever years because things are that bad. Well and one of the reasons I’ve lived by fives series television show and I mention of the Twelve Monkeys story is because it really digs into some of these moral quandary about what right do we have from our perspective of history to go back and erase many many people’s lives who have had children who have fallen in love and have made contributions who have made sacrifices. What right do we have to go back and take away all of those things to correct a situation when you’re not happy with it and whether that situation is people dying in terrible play or I don’t like my latte. There is a question of why should my satisfaction with that circumstance be a catalyst to demystify these people. Should we just try. I do move forward from where we are and find a solution to our problem rather than trying to have never had a problem in the first. One thing to realize that we’re always at the moment no matter what we are always in every single point whether we’ve gone back in time with the we’re sitting here right now at a moment where some bad things have happened in the past. Many things are possible in the future and that injures our actions. I realize that you know these people want to change the past but in any given moment even where they’re out without going back in time travel they’re still changing the future. Ultimately it’s not really doing anything the people who died are already dead to go back. Yes they would have been alive but then you’re killing other people. You’re actually destroying whole universes. I don’t know if in the original twelve monkeys by Terry Gilliam that the show is based off of the way they frame it as least a sort of moral justification to themselves as there is no real other option. This is the sort of last ditch effort. If this doesn’t happen it all ends. The human experiment does not persist and they feel that any consequence of going back and radically changing the timeline is the better option is that there it is the absolute rock bottom where they are right now there is nowhere to go but up next ten Days of Future Past and Terminator also do things where it actually gets to the point before them before someone makes a decision it has to be at the point of human extermination. Is is based on as well and those definitely let you out of the moral or the entire human race were to be extinct because you didn’t do this. It does give you a bit of a free hand in terms of whether or not a right to do this. There’s a certain more others don’t say you don’t have the right to make that decision for someone else but for the most part most of us I think would get on board with well if everyone’s going to die anyway if I don’t do it I might as well done. That’s actually the reason I like other tack from told me to be here is a much better there is a survivor group in the future. Things are out and there might even be the potential for a cure to the plague going forward. But because of our own petty obsessions and self interest we are pushing forward with this other program and I don’t want to spoil too much of the show because it’s very recent and I don’t want to you know you have to demand reasons for someone not to watch what I think is a very good series but it’s definitely more nuanced look at what would happen if that wasn’t good things if we just had to make the decision to apply that to work. Kill Hitler. I definitely think that’s a big one when you want to frame time travel in as a moral question is would it be. Would it be more preferable to roll the cosmic dice and throw caution to the wind to go back and prevent the rise of the Nazi party the entirety of World War two the development of nuclear weapons the Holocaust everything that immediately comes from the rise of Hitler in the knowledge of party versus the so now seventy years of history that has come about since for some people it definitely seem like it would be a better option to throw the cosmic dice but I don’t think it’s as cut and dry as that. Erasing seventy years of history much worse for further back. He’s too big a problem I think. Any one person or even group of people to decide you know essentially touches on a bit of time travel media if you will the airship pirates novels Captain Robert Brown. He talks about going back in time and stopping very strong speech from happening Hitler from coming to power genocide from occurring that sort of thing and ends up creating a future wherein a charismatic leader comes along and nobody stops to think and question whether or not they should let him take over the world. Horrible horrible things have happened in history there’s absolutely no doubt that the Holocaust was horrible horrible horrible thing. We want a lot of lessons from as a society I think it’s been prevented from oh we would have been much more interesting with it for much longer than we have been I mean it was really rampant rise up until World War two and report father McLachlan so much as it was very popular and then all of a sudden that was not cool anymore. The notion of genocide as being a horrible crime didn’t exist before then ovulation worked each other out before then but then at this point I think I think we I think it got bad enough to actually sort of slap humanity in the face into just a couple things. Maybe not all of us have learned it but enough of us have that it that it’s kind of been cemented in this case that there are certain lines that are just wrong I think. I think it’s dangerous to open the door to what it we learn from the very very bad things in history because by that same logic one can argue why stop the very bad things from happening in the future. Well I think we could almost paraphrase given the sort of. Quandary those who do not let history pass as it as it is our duty to cause it to happen in the first place. I mean that’s a little bulkier than the those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. But if Yeah if not one set of events to make us look at the face of our own evil as it were what would what what is the what is that that meant for him to use a term that any loony frequently uses in a game he developed about time travel. Crow not the only way the only way to really morally inoculate ourselves against or is to have experienced it. Which means that such or is inevitable is important we all do then it’s only building up more and more herbs. Silence river. I grant you the last word. OK so today we kind of a few different more recent time travel stories and I think there’s a lot more that do really well to pique the interest about time travel and ask questions about time travel and I don’t want to list some of them for movies I could definitely suggest primer although it’s really really dense and kind of needs a lot of unpacking it’s probably the hardest science fiction time travel film I’ve ever seen. Time car which we kind of touched on. It’s not it’s super soft but it’s the correcting the timeline so bad stuff doesn’t happen in the future. John wrote of time travel as it were there are some great writings on it on time travel on he’s on B. by Robert Heinlein’s a great short story slash novella deals with the self-correcting paradox of course back to the future and Bill intended everybody out there. Players at those I guess as it were involving time travel great anime of all things that actually deals with causality is Stine’s gate which deals with the problem comes out with and branching timelines and the negative effects they can have and certainly some of the positive votes they can have and I would have a little bit. But both versions of twelve monkeys from what I understand are pretty fantastic I can never leave out for the movie the series sounds pretty great. Quantum Leap is a lot of fun and it’s kind of campy and cheesy but it’s a great eighty’s or use that did these sort of make sure events that are supposed to happen. Do you happen sort of time travel and it is ridiculous but it does play with that concept a little bit. The Time Machine I don’t have the original and she was a novella or one of the movie adaptations is one of the more classic examples one of the first examples we see with time travel Slaughterhouse Five by her bonnet it is sort of it is definitely time travel but it’s it’s instead of willfully time traveling it’s being moved back and forth over most against your will and the way the character deals with that is kind of interesting how hands Crosstime Saloon is a great series of short stories and that was by sprite Robinson that well doesn’t necessarily deal with time travel specifically it is definitely a key mechanic in the sort of universe and deals with some of the more cultural and moral implications of it. The second story is about a sort of time traveler that most people wouldn’t think of it in that way but definitely experiences a lot of the problems time travelers do some of the works. OK Dick Minority Report. Try to stop crimes before they happen. Presidents sort of deal paycheck. Probably not a great example but an example of the US is in the name of a king or is a somewhat infamous Bowl film based off of the Dungeon Siege. But it definitely deals with some sort of time travel. I think sort of but I mean these and there’s a lot more of the interim of the event people are talking of with great new ideas and new concepts involving time travel and new ways to think about it. New questions ask all the time and I definitely suggest as a sort of super genre checking it out you know reading more into it as it were. Oh physics of the impossible by which you’re talking is also deals with this in a more scientific way. How dare you how dare you recommend books by that man Dr Who’s your cock who is my arch nemesis and I will have none of you plucking these materials. Well that’s all the time we have for today. Don’t forget to subscribe and review on i Tunes follow us on Twitter send us your questions and if you like what we’re doing here supported some patriotic join us last time after I get everything put back in its proper order. I will have been your host perfessor MO I was shall I be Bruce. I will be there for you guys. I think I figured out time travel. Oh yeah look here. OK So imagine four balls at the edge of a cliff with something. Address the times free time begins to correct itself and one of those balls falls off the edge of the cliff. It was an all clear. No.

welcome one adult. Professor battles a great debate and calamitous commentary. The philosophical change game today’s episode identity for a one K. hash tag yolo. I’m your host Professor battle. I’m Sean and Bruce and finally got a call really of our call and has finally received a message to the right guy. Oh hell no. Well that was interesting. Yeah. What just happened. Did you just give liquid burns from from your future self Bruce. In this one of the shenanigans so well OK well thrown out of here but didn’t you just give yourself a buzz. Well somebody some version of me from the future is telling me to do something that would benefit him. That exactly the same thing as giving me advice or is he trying to get me to do something that would be good for him. But are you and me aren’t you and him. The same you. I knew this is a little bit complicated. Bruce you will have are going to break into that room. I keep telling you all to stay out. I would never. That’s what’s in the cool. No no that’s what will be in the room and OK good to know it all. So you’ve in the future is not to you from now. Well clearly you want me to do with bunch of stuff but I don’t want to do so if we’re of two opinions on it. How could we be the same person. So conflict is constantly running an internal monologue that I think people have noticed not just because there’s not enough pretty much just you but mine isn’t. OK so in order for as random as the you can from the future is different because he has a different opinion or has a different opinion because he’s a different person. Well I’m just saying that the fact that we have different opinions is evidence that we’re not necessarily the same person. Maybe there are different levels of identity in one sense we could say with the same person and that we’re different points on this thread of the timeline on the other or different points but which you want what he wants because you will eventually you know. Well I will love what he was when I in but I clearly don’t want that now. OK All right. But why wouldn’t you. Because I know the guy’s probably kind of a jerk but you’re you’re banking right is life saving right. You’re not exactly losing money you’re just keeping it for a later date. You’re going to do something with it at a time in the future. So it’s not the same as having I don’t know last fall. Hundred dollars but I guess the question really is do we are worse off for the now or should we live for later. I don’t think that’s a big question that’s being asked today on the whole especially given modern circumstances and what’s been going on in society. Well let’s unpack it in those terms though it seems like in some sense you’ve only lost the opportunity to have done something right. You’re not losing the opportunity to have done something huge or you are losing the ability to have done it in the present. So no sense of presence never changing moment in which takes seriously the notion that the person in the future is different from the person now then isn’t the person now always slipping away into someone who we aren’t anymore. It is possible well I guess there has to be kind of a balance to people who at least do this well I mean we haven’t necessarily established that saving up or doing things for our future self is the best idea but we have seen cases of people who don’t do it at all and their life sort of goes out the rail some point people who do too much and are always chasing something that ahead of them and they never stop to enjoy life. Clearly if there is a way to do it it was somewhere in the middle between those two extremes. This also gets into a basic I don’t know call of Korea fickle because it isn’t so much about right or wrong or morality but it is one of the things that it’s founded on which is the control and there are a lot of came through test that people have done for example when you take a child and you tell him I’ll give you one piece of candy now or if you can sit still for a couple minutes I’ll give you two peas Candy. You’re asking them to do the same thing to put up with not getting any any now in order to get a greater good. Later But that’s I think part of the problems especially when you expand that out. The future’s no real guarantee I mean there’s no guarantee that if you put money away now that that money will be worth anything even ten years much less forty fifty years. So why would we. We live in uncertain times as it were. Well have these a lot of people feel that way. Well that’s a densely classic argument about a guy who goes job in every day and drops dead of a heart attack in the park and gets found by a couple of hours wandering around. Right like this is the idea that if the future is not that I am essentially putting my faith and trust in future events coming to fruition in a way that is valuable to me while I could at any moment dying of some terrible random year strike or car crash or whatever else and bust those investments and sometimes would not come to fruition overwork calculations are to some extent of the risk calculation. However I think we can we can also come up with plenty of examples of people who really do live for the moment and just blow money as soon as it gets in their hands and just pretty much follow every urge they have at the moment they have it without really kind of self-restraint and so there are lots of examples there too. So kind of getting back to the Are you the same you sort of thing. There is actually a basis in biology for that to be false because of the way humans generate new cells in tissue over time I think that harming that understanding is basically there’s a quote unquote new E.U. every seven years there. It’s because of your body has effectively replaced itself over the course of seven years your your liver has generated new souls and all of your muscles and skin and everything and it’s practically the same D.N.A. pattern but different cells as it were different different parts. There’s a classical thought experiment regarding the exactly this is getting to the problem of identity with the Argus. The ship just in the Argonauts famous Greek ship there sailing around it from time to time. Pieces need to be replaced and they replace them out and they do so until there are known to be original piece of the left is the same Argus is the first question the second question is What if a collector has been taking all of your original pieces and they put together a new ship the rickety old version of the original pieces of the ship in the same original configuration is that the Argos. Or is the one that has none of the original pieces in it but has been in continuous operation. The Argus. What’s more important a continuous way front moves forward or what it’s made from. It’s something to think about I think about it give me a little bit differently. I think that that idea of me in the here and now is absolutely certain but I doubt that and I can’t rest anything because everything is epistemically built upon that. The idea that I have had a past and that I will have a future. The thread that runs forward and backward. Those are extremely high probability theories it is not impossible that the universe didn’t it into itself five minutes ago so unlikely as to be not worth considering except in relation to these kinds of discussions but the fact that it’s not impossible means that my future and past existence are certain in the way that my Nichiren. So there’s a slight difference. OK. I think as a mature setting and there’s a certain kind of sense. I mean some level I don’t think of myself as having been diminished by the shedding of use in cell that are taking a bath. But at the same time it’s very kind of my arm and asked me is that my arm was no longer attached to my body it’s no longer part of my living cell I would still identify that as my arm as a part of my body even though it’s no longer in the how do you think it will take to test that theory. Steve thank you. You know under most human rights law I think you get to keep the arm. Well and that’s probably for the best because I have a feeling I’m going to need it in the very near future. But it’s still mind it’s still part of me even though it is now separated Yeah you can take it home with a bag. So but that’s that’s different from a part of me. Right because I don’t take parts of me home in a bag they come along as associated with the meanness as a matter of fact. Moreover than that I would actually have trouble recognizing a version of me that now is less an arm as me if I were looking at it than I would if I were in the position of having me are going to imagine yourself right. But in a very evil genius sort of twist one of your eyes has been removed and you’re now wearing an eye patch. But this is you version from very similar time scale one thousand nine hundred mins in the future. Would you recognize that you as being you or would there be a jarring difference from the you you reckon I guess it would be up to what I would choke. Likelihood of me losing it. I would in the next fifteen minutes which is probably higher than average. That’s fair minded. Oh please will put it back on later. Quit whining. Identity is complicated and especially when you get into for example parts being translated into other people. Musical repugnant for example when you disassociate ownership from body parts in sort of a ridiculous scenario but it does touch on whether you were yours. I think that’s actually a very good point it’s a matter of fact I have heard the phrase and been frustrated by that phrase on many occasions from people talking about transplanting organs you have so and so’s heart right. Well it seems like to me is it summed up inside my body and Huling as occurred to such an extent that that is now interconnected and functional within my body is no longer someone so it’s hard. It’s now my heart. It’s now that person’s body part that is connected with their tissues and been a part of their living Athens so bodily autonomy aside I think we tend to need to get back to our core concept here. Do we know ourselves something. Should we feel like we need to do something for ourselves going forward or do we feel like we need to do something for ourselves as a leader time. Should we save that extra few dollars or should we just spend it on something that looks nice. Marketers of long called Saving consumerism needlessly delayed the concept that we are in some way putting something away for the future is of course risky on something but what. Others knew of this question is not so much the idea that there might be different self than I am now in the future. What bothers me is when that line can be drawn right because I am always a slightly different person. Everything now passes. So what point does the person that I am now in some sense become different from the person I will be. That’s fair I think that different people view that differently I think it’s much more subjective sort of thing. So for some folks it’s when other pinion about something has significantly changed or when you know more than formerly had it depends on the person person or what if the past me had made the better decisions such that my life right now we’re in a much better place. I’d certainly enjoy it and maybe if I take the time to set that up and develop those with the neck and you know enjoy those going forward not just at any one point. That sort of continuously improve my life and keep improving and making it better and that you know the question some point in my nose at the Meet me at this instant there isn’t I who will enjoy the benefits of that in the same way that other mean we who’s here now would have enjoyed the benefits of the past me had made better decisions for I think that’s coming from the benefit of hindsight. I’m sure we can all look back and say well if I’ve done this better if I had studied more in school if I had worked out more or what have you then my life in some way would be objective better and we don’t know that because it didn’t happen. Therefore it is undoable thing well again to reach back a little further the idea of them even bothered by is what I tell stuff. Now he needs to start a strict regiment of the high protein low carb diet NG so that I can now be skinny and feel good about my body whereas I might be happy to tell me from two weeks ago not to eat that piece of cake because we’re going to feel bad because of it it seems like there’s not much different me for many years ago. Then there is a me from not that long ago. Yeah you know if that applies going forward there’s a meat was very like the meat today who will be the me in two weeks and there’s a very different me who beat me in twenty years. If there will be give me twenty years it is another thing that I’m here from the ME in the past is not just the circumstances of my life but also the memories that I had. I go back to the seven year old me and say you know you need to buckle down and do the work to get really good grades so that you get high enough and that’s going to get through college and get it for. OK so I know classes stop or back to my time now I trust myself much of my childhood. No this is a trade out here so in some sense what we’re getting to talking about is the notion of OK very deeply into a lot with this concept of whether or not we want something different from a past or future self. Right. If I regret decisions that I’ve made in the past then I might want to make changes to those decisions. Yes On the other hand I do not regret decisions as some other sectors additions I would probably not ask for that to be changed. Going back on the other hand a lot of the moments that I thought I really wanted to tell them were the ones that turned out to be the ones I regretted later so if I know there are certain certain decisions that have in my past been things I regret then. My goal be to not have regrets to want to change anyway but then you still have to suffer with the circumstances that made you regret it right. But maybe I could just not regret the circumstances. Isn’t that what your loan is all about and I think this I think is the Buddhist jerk redefined what makes you happy and everything’s fine. Well but there’s I don’t feel there’s necessarily anything wrong with it if you have the means to change something about your past self. Would you do with the understanding that you would fundamentally alter yourself of now you would radically change potentially radically change everything you are. Let me just go ahead and throw this out here. Fundamentally altering the person that you will have are being is not necessarily all that that’s true. I can think of some improvements I could I could put on my soul but of the bad for me I mean me one year unless all my flaws were terrible. Just comparing myself to the future of Bessel but altered so now. Right that’s a fair point and we’re making a lateral move if you will. Certainly but I mean I think that’s at least until we can kind of read that time bigger year or find a means to temporarily fundamentally alter ourselves which I have done. Apparently fair we have to I think learn to live with ourselves as it were and learn to accept our faults what we’ve done wrong. Well there is the issue of regret. I feel that it is better for myself at least for the self to reconcile that to me. I think it’s the same question of striving in the here and now for the future moment. Again get back to the Trinity. Me in the here and now. In this version on only ten children timeline is the basis of everything else that I think might exist. One of the next two. In order to bridge the problem of induction I have to believe in past and future. I have to have some expectation that there is a future and I have to have some memory of the past in order to make a rational choice about my behavior to bring that expectation about the second world as I can make choices along so past present and future are required to be assumed the past and future are based on the present. But to choose at all is based on the belief in all three. So are we talking about as opposed to like Russell’s high five minute universe hypothesis would you marvel literally. Yeah I definitely think for purposes of this conversation we need to assume that the past is something that happened in the future is something that will happen. But what’s important it seems like to me about you know LOL And that’s right the sense that there is some attitude of don’t do things for the future do things for them now. In so much as we are unsure of the future it is the sense that we cannot assume a future and also know that we have lived to the greatest possible extent in the time we were here because you never believe there will be a future that doesn’t happen right. Whether it happens tomorrow because I get run over by a car whether it happens when I’m ninety five it does my oxygen filter gives out on my fancy electric or whatever else there will be a moment at which I was here and then I am not you know I can see you of me in that future and then everything. You saved up whether the party needed to do something or some form of well then boy I think this is something that humans struggled with not just recently but for a very very long time. Frost is a very good example of the road was taken and it’s not entirely binary choice it really has an entire range of behaviors towards saving up opportunities for the future and expending all of our opportunities right now in between which we navigate to some degree so that live for the NOW thing might be the messages some people need to hear when they are enjoying their life too much because they’re working too hard to do bank for the future and or risk of never actually cashing in their opportunities. Straighten your message here for people who are constantly spending all of their opportunities and not saving or increasing their not just material but its wealth of that situation. Spiritual Well yeah so I think that at this point we kind of need to touch on that music video the Lonely Island there’s about you know love and the switch stance but the video takes for those of you haven’t seen it. It starts off with the premise that yolo is this rallying cry for a generation and this sense of adventure and very quickly changes. Here’s to you only live once meaning. Be careful about that. Don’t take unnecessary risks and by the end of the letter you know you know it’s come to be stated as you want to work out and they’re very very risk averse. I think in their house trying to avoid all possible risks the exact opposite of what it’s originally taken. And what’s interesting about that is that even within the mini world constructed by the video both ends of the spectrum represented as being very poor choice right. Going too far into living without regret doing whatever you feel like at the time is represented very poorly at the beginning and by the end of it. Watch yourself in the house burn off your fingerprints don’t get anywhere near a window both ends of this are represented as being very negative experiences. I feel at this point it’s kind of fair to point out that both traditional Buddhism and Hagel have something to say about this. That may be one or the other extreme isn’t the best option but rather that the best option lies somewhere in the middle. I think you’re going to throw down to an operational. I have always liked the phrase moderation in all things especially moderation I feel like Graham’s young son was going to have too much moderation in moderation you know. Well it was only moderately to be fair. I definitely agree with that on a personal level I think there are times in which you kind of have to go well I want to drink and I want to party but also just have to be at work tomorrow or I want to go I want to party and I have no commitments the next day. You know sometimes you have to throw caution to the wind and kind of live in the now. Personally I feel that not doing so wastes an opportunity and with the way that quite a bit of society is growing I feel those opportunities are fewer and fewer going forward but I think this entire process. I mean no one answer to it but the constant thing of managing the risk vs reward system for Trinity versus value in the now versus bank value is what’s very commonly referred to as work life balance. Sure and while we’re playing the game of relating this to your neck you learn the most. Times I think we need to talk about what it is that we’re trying to avoid in our plans. And that’s been termed a poem or if you’re missing out right that to some degree is the driving force behind trying to live and this other kind of way. So whatever balance we strike we have to be one in which we are personally satisfied that we are not trying to live so far outside of ourselves that we can’t hold it together to have the things we want and at the same time has to satisfy and say here that we missed out on something we would have wanted to be a part. This would touch on something else. You get a little bit sidebar it but I think it I think it works well when you are taking in the experiences that you want to because you want them. I think people go overboard when they want to take in. Like you said fear of missing out other people are having more fun than me and internalizing their desires and treating them as if they were my own. And you find you still doing a lot of things that maybe you don’t really want to do that everyone else is doing it and I should know I don’t want to be the lame person peer pressure or whatever that kind of internalizing other people’s expectations also happens a lot with attractions self image of beauty but also with what what we want from life. And I think that’s where people go overboard is when they aren’t sure what they want so they’re just sort of looking around at what other people want in doing that. So that’s different about that experience when we talk about the future when we talk about selves that are not yet. Right. Seems to me that there is a distinction between the sense I have about telling my past self to do something that benefits me and the sense I have of being. Told by a future self to whom I am the past self to do something for him. Sometimes I get to in the first scenario where I’m telling my past oscillator to externalize micro right. I guess my body consciousness and externalize it onto my younger self and say you should have worked out more uneaten right. Whereas when I’m in the position of being externalized all one by just future self I am awfully resistant to the idea of being the one who should be put upon to make this decision whether it is giving up my money for some future self whether it is making healthier decisions. I don’t want to because it’s me who has to suffer for it. So why am i so the worst from past me and future me. Why don’t I see them as being the same. And he is the difference between people who do and don’t make decisions based on future versions of themselves. It was saved well for retirement and worked out a lot now with more problems which I think it’s easier when looking at past me to judge how much better things could have been their own material differences I have the benefit of hindsight I think it’s harder when judging past me because their internal states are kind of hard to remember they’re really streaming through or just how much I really wanted to screw around back then and how important it really was to me. Didn’t it used to dismiss it when I compare it to my hindsight benefit calculation of how much better material certain things this could have been had I not screwed around so much. But let’s face it really what it is really a lot so I think part of what goes into it due to the uncertainty of the future. We talked about this a little bit. Are we sure that if we get contacted by a future self. By the act of them contacting us they have potentially change that future. You know they what we aren’t sure he’s actually going to happen when I am actually talking past me with at risk for work calculation of like you know how much I want to screw around versus how much different things would have been. I also removed the risk that I didn’t know back then because I’m using hindsight I know things could have been better I know how things ended up with with certainty back then I didn’t remember or refraining from screw around for a chance at a better life as opposed to the certainty that I see now well into sort of projected back into the future self being reversed an area in some sense the me in the future wants to be changed in the matter of whether he might or might not be a different me he wants to be it if he wants to be to me who have these other men and that’s also a form of risk reward calculation because he doesn’t know those of those advantages actually getting what he wants. That’s just his perspective on how to get to a place where he’s happy. Perhaps it turns out I study hard get into a good college and then get shot because I was on the wrong campus at the wrong time during the wrong police action. He doesn’t know that because he’d never been that person in the end the person who did it with the exception of maybe total consciousness or complete for knowledge of the future it will always seem of certain and combative to us I think. Well not to take this too far into the metaphor but based on past performance my ability to determine what made my life a better experience has not been great. So how can I trust the future me to be any better at it than I was and we don’t have the hindsight. We have more certainty of the earth and that’s that’s fair and so it is a powerful powerful weapon. Well yeah but you know past me was a little shit in the future we might just be an even bigger shit so I don’t know I think I’ve gotten less and less stubborn as the time goes on I think I’ve been more and more likely to listen the more likely to listen to a message from my future self and I will be a look at this point how so but I think I definitely do feel that the do we owe ourselves anything. Risk reward those lies somewhere in the middle. I feel like some future planning is not necessarily a bad thing but I don’t feel that we should necessarily use that as an excuse to miss out on opportunities that may indeed be once in a lifetime opportunities just for experience to cash out some of our future opportunity and then to now. Absolutely. I’ve been very lucky in that I have been given a lot of opportunities a lot of people I don’t know how I don’t and I am grateful for that and if I could go back in time there are a lot of mistakes I made I don’t know that I would change any of it because I don’t know that I would necessarily come out better for it. Not necessarily just economically or morally or philosophically I would honestly rather keep myself then turn into someone different and perhaps we’d move into a model that could actually give us some insight on maybe we need to see this is an economy of opportunities right. There is a cost of opportunities past present and future and that the decision has to be made on the basis of the understanding of an exchange of one kind or two that if I choose to expand my opportunity to go to a better college. On my opportunity to go to Vegas for this weekend. Then perhaps I can weigh the value of those two experience directly against one another in an economic kind of way in a calculable humans kind of way. I think there’s a good way to talk about conflict in both lot of value decisions. Risk were all things that are available in economics. So I think that is a good language to discuss it wrong. You know once I could go back to the beginning of this entire pod cast that’s how I’ve been talking about it from the start. So I’m certain all of you remember that we can and Vegas when you were about twenty. Recall that pretty clearly. Now I want you to imagine for a moment somebody came to you and said Would you rather have a good college education or weekend in Vegas. Think back on that weekend and realize you’ve already made your decision. That’s Professor Meadow silence. I can’t believe that work. Sean I great tone to use the last word. Well thank you professor. All right kids join me as we go on our journey. Grab the dirt first Carmen your Nicci mustache and let’s get into this thing so I have refrained thus far from getting into new territory and well I’m not going to be able to do it anymore so today’s episode gets on each corner for the last word in each is work. There is a very famous thought experiment called the eternal workers and basically the concept of the eternal occurrences of all time is a flat this that your little segment up off on some far flung edge of the disk of time passes but eventually the whole thing comes back around. Nietzsche illustrates this by way of a demon who sits in your room one night and tells you. Everything you’ve gone through thus far in your life will be repeated. It immediately that you will essentially cease to have new experiences here and will go back to the beginning of your life to experience it again in exactly the same way. Nature’s question about this is not whether or not this is a good thing that’s happened it’s how do you feel about it. Are you immediately overjoyed that you get to live your life again that you get to go through doing all of these things and being all of these things. Or are you very upset about all the hardships you’ll now have to endure again that you got past all of these terrible things and now you have to start all over again. Nicci point in asking a question like this is to ask us to look at our lives and to analyze how we feel about them not to figure out which things we did or didn’t like which things we do or don’t approve of. But to ask us to evaluate the way that we live our lives if we live a life in such a way that we would feel terrible about having to go back to the beginning and do it all over again. What does that say about the way we’ve lived that life and how should we try to live what should we live a life that is entirely full of joy. One that makes us happy. Up to the moment of our death or should we endure hardships to be something else something more. What needs is getting to though and this is where it gets a little bit confusing because there are two major schools. One is that Nietzsche was a determinist and that he thought that essentially this was something that could happen in the universe. He didn’t have a good reason a scientific basis or an observation from which to derive the idea that that did happen but he did have the idea that it was a possible way the world life that everything might rotate. Background in you might have to start again. And if that were the case wouldn’t you want to think about it in advance and have a wife that would be joyous and well lived. From that point on the second possibility and the one that is probably the most popular is that this is just thought experiment to ask you to consider what has gone on in your life and how you choose to live it to think about these things in such a way that we might conceive of a recurrence of time there is a third alternative to which I first tried that is sort of a merging of the two ideas and that is that this is not a fact of the universe nor is it a valid experiment but instead makes a central imperative something that should give us a way to live our lives but we must live as if it were true that this would be the case and this is not solely for our own happiness as we know nature was very interested in how hardships formed us into better and stronger people. But you should be celebrating your hardships to come to a point of what he called a more fatty or the love of it the love of my life it even if it means that I will have to experience terrible things over again my life even if I were overcome immense challenges even if it will be painful and hard to get back through all of the things that go on in my life. I should love the life that I have. I should celebrate the hardships that have come before me and I face the universe with joy in my heart. The concept of getting to live like this again to experience all of these things to go through this pain to come out the other side of it and to be made better by it over and over for nature. Coming to a point of celebration of even the hardest things in our lives makes us the kind of people that does. Serve to go forward in the future. That point of acknowledging accepting and impressing our fates makes us the kind of people who can make decisions going forward that are not based merely on our own pleasure pain Matrix or someone else’s rule based matrix but instead allows us to seize on those parts of the world that we think are important and embrace them no matter how painful they are. What made you want to just under stand in all of this is that by embracing these things by becoming someone who can accept the painting Arjen of their life and still face the world with joy in our hearts. We put ourselves in the position of being able to overcome all the come before us in the future also. And so we have her selves. Why do I do these things. Why do I live this way. And if the answer is just to avoid pain or gain pleasure then have we really done anything worthwhile. But if the answer is because it made me better because it made me stronger because it made it possible for me to go forward and to do more and be more and leave a lasting impact on the world then that is a life well lived in each person. If I lived for my own sake if I lived by my own rules and I went out in the world and made something than I’d have done well the question of the actuality of the eternal recurrence is a bit more tenuous it seems that the universe does not work that way. But if we consider the concept of multiple universes if we consider the concept of a universe that possibly crunches back in at the end of its life cycle. If we consider the possibility that in the heat death of the universe there might be a quantum tunneling effect that causes a new Big Bang the start of the thing over again and the infinite possibilities of the multiverse of many universes forming and collapsing in the same way. Then is that someone realistic to imagine that. I’m wearing the cause over and over again after millions and millions of cycles. There might be another world in which a creature so much like me at so as to be distinct in very few ways might exist. Then it becomes something worth considering that maybe by pondering this very thought of sperm and determining the way that I think that creature that person should also find love. And that’s a pretty expansive thought. I think a lot of ways need to was telling us not what belief about the universe but how to approach what we believe. Well that’s all the time we have for today. Don’t forget to subscribe in review on i Tunes follow us on Twitter send us your questions and if you like what we’re doing here. So for this unpatriotic. Join us next time after I punish Bruce for what he will have done. I’ve been your host perfessor medal. I was will be Sean it was will be forever. I don’t know if that’s me. There are scenes after and that’s the room the machine will be hand. You know what.